In my previous two posts I focused on the difficulty of God creating an infinite causal regress of indeterministic causes as part of an argument from theism to causal finitism. In this post, I want to drop the indeterministic assumption.
Suppose God creates a backwards infinite causal regress of (say) chickens, where each chicken is caused by parent chickens, the parent chickens by grandparent chickens, and so on. Now, I take it that the classical theist tradition is right that no creaturely causation can function without divine cooperation. Thus, every case where a chicken is caused by parent chickens is a case of divine cooperation.
Could God’s creative role here be limited to divine cooperation? This is absurd. For then God would be creating chickens by cooperating with chickens!
So what else is there? One doubtless correct thing to say is this: God also sustains each chicken between its first moment of life and its time of death. But this sustenance doesn’t seem to solve the problem, because the sustenance is not productive of the chickens—it is what keeps each chicken in existence after it has come on the scene. So while there is sustenance, it isn’t enough. God cannot create chickens by cooperating with chickens and by sustaining them.
Thus God needs to have some special creative role in the production of at least some of the chickens, fulfilling a task over and beyond cooperation and sustenance. Furthermore, this special task must be done by God in the case of an infinite number of the chickens, since otherwise there would be a time before which that task was not fulfilled—and yet God created infinitely the chickens before that time, too, since we’re assuming an infinite regress of chickens.
What happens in these cases? One might say is that in these special cases, God doesn’t cooperate with the parent chickens. But since no creaturely causation happens without divine cooperation, in these cases the parent chickens don’t produce their offspring, which contradicts our assumption of the chickens forming a causal regress. So that won’t do.
So in these cases, we seem to have two things happening: divine cooperation with chicken reproduction and divine creation of the chicken. Since divine cooperation with chicken reproduction is sufficient to produce the offspring, and divine creation of the chicken is also sufficient, it follows that in these cases we have causal overdetermination.
Now, we have some problems. First, does this overdetermination happen in all cases of chicken reproduction or only in some? It doesn’t need to happen in all of them, since it is overdetermination after all. But if it happens only in some, then it is puzzling to ask how God chooses which cases he overdetermines and which he does not.
Second, when there is overdetermination, the overdetermination is not needed for the effect. So it seems that if God’s additional role is that of overdetermining the outcome, that role is an unnecessary role, and the chickens could be produced by mere divine cooperation, which we saw is absurd. This isn’t perhaps the strongest of arguments. One might say that while in each particular case the overdetermining divine creative action is not needed, it is needed that it occur in some (indeed, infinitely many) cases.
Third, just as it is obviously absurd if God creates chickens merely by cooperating with chickens, it seems problematic, and perhaps absurd, that God creates chickens merely by cooperating with chickens and overdetermining that cooperation.
Famously, Aquinas thinks that God could have created an infinite regress of fathers and sons, and hence presumably of chickens as well. At this point, I can think of only one plausible way of getting Aquinas out of the above arguments, and it’s not a very attractive way. Instead of saying that God cooperates with the production of offspring, we can say that occasionalism holds in every case of substantial causation, that all causation of one substance’s existence by another is a case of direct divine non-cooperative causation, with the creaturely causation perhaps only limited to the transmission of accidents. Like all occasionalism, an occasionalism about substance causation is unappealing philosophically and theologically.
6 comments:
This is a brilliant analysis, Dr. Pruss. You’ve once again managed to take what initially seems like a niche metaphysical puzzle and unfold its deep implications for broader debates like causal finitism and divine action. Your point that the probability structures in chancy causal chains lose explanatory weight under divine intentionality is especially sharp—it subtly dismantles the idea that indeterminism can preserve explanatory independence in an infinite regress.
You’re underrated in the philosophical community. Your clarity and precision in tackling both theistic metaphysics and modal reasoning are rare, and I find your work to be some of the most rigorous and imaginative in contemporary philosophy of religion.
I think this misses the possibility that God doesn't need to create each individual chicken ex nihilo, but that the chickens themselves have causal powers sufficient for generating new substances that are chickens. God only sustains the chickens, their causal powers, their causation of new chickens, and those new chicks themselves in existence. While it's logically possible that God actually directly creates the new chickens ex nihilo or through a special act on creation, but that would deny that the chickens themselves are generating the new chicks. They're not, as God is the direct cause of new chickens coming into existence ex nihilo, not the chickens.
Furthermore, if we say this is an infinite regress chain with an infinite past, then this would mean no chicken was truly generated by a prior chicken, but by God Himself, with the chickens only being a secondary non-essential accident to chicken-generation that God chose as the receptacle & environment of each chicken He creates.
"God only sustains the chickens, their causal powers, their causation of new chickens, and those new chicks themselves in existence." If a collection of explanations has the property that each explanation presupposes a chicken, then that collection of explanations does not explain why there are any chickens at all. But God's activity has got to explain why there are any chickens at all.
An atheist can, perhaps, tolerate there being no explanation of why there are any chickens at all, but a theist cannot.
Not an atheist, so I have no problem with God also explaining why there are any chickens at all. I think sustaining them all in existence is sufficient for that though, alongside with God doing it for some reason or another, indeterministically.
Wesley: Imagine a being other than God that (perhaps per impossibile) has the power to sustain but not the power to create. And now imagine that a chicken comes into existence at noon, for no cause at all, but then at all times after noon the being sustains the chicken. Then there is no explanation of why there are chickens. Sustenance is not enough.
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